Story

Man is Not God

AH article image

Authors: Mark Helprin

Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)

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February/March 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 1

Given that the full written history of man encompasses approximately 2500 years, the lesson of the century may be calculated proportionally as 4 percent of the wisdom of the ages. Although movie stars do better, in this instance 4 percent of the gross from dollar one is a major assignment for someone who at mid-century was three years of age, but I think that even then what I now see as the century’s most important truth began to come clear for me, although of course I did not know it.

 

I turned four in the summer of 1951, in Paris, in the care of a French woman whose name was Thérèse and whom I considered both strict and severe. She was a traditional Catholic who had neither time for nor understanding of the fashionable doctrines according to which I was being brought up in Manhattan. Most likely unacquainted with Ethical Culture, psychoanalysis, and moral relativism, she was probably ignorant as well of Alfred Adler, John Dewey, and Dr. Spock. She had never heard of Wilhelm Reich. She had never heard of the Third Ear. But she did believe in Heaven and Hell, and she widened my eyes a number of times with her classical description of their mesmerizing characteristics.

She was a stickler and she loved routine. Every day, we would take a walk, stopping invariably in the Place de la something or other—I never knew the name, or if I did I have forgotten it—to sit in an outdoor café. There she introduced me to the lumpy kind of yogurt and World War II. The buildings fronting the square had been pockmarked to death. “Why?” I asked. Then came, from this woman of great reserve, this stickler, this disciplinarian, this prude, a torrent of emotion.

The war was not even six years behind us. She had struggled through it, she had survived, she had lost the man she loved. I, who hadn’t even known what a war was, by the time she finished had begun to know. I could feel it. I could sense it. It lay underneath, the unseen foundation of everything—of my parents’ lives, of her life, of my life. Having been alerted to this great and terrible thing, I was from then on as watchful for it as if for a sabertoothed tiger. That summer I became, wherever I went, the amateur registrar of the pockmarks of buildings. Especially in Italy, after we had crested the Grimsel Pass in our Hillman Minx, with Thérèse and me in the back, remarking on the summer snowfields, I was attentive to the ruined buildings, the fortifications, the remnants of battle now rusting steel.

My father had been in this war, and my uncles: 22 of my family all told, including cousins. All had returned but one, though I was not told of him until many years later and then, for some reason, only offhandedly. I speculate now that I was able to